10 Photos per Second of Hurricane Sandy on Instagram

Plenty of people are posting what they see, but there are many fakes as well

Hurricane Sandy photos on Instagram

Instagram is having a big moment due to Hurricane Sandy, with the storm still ravaging the US eastern coast, people are uploading all the photos they can take. At its peak, Instagram saw 10 photos every second tagged with "Sandy" or "hurricane."

The site Instacane, built on top of the Instagram API, is the best resource for surfacing all of those photos. The site was put together a few months back, for Hurricane Irene, but it's making the most of it now.

While some are quick to label this as Instagram big journalism moment, an awful lot of the photos are fake, over and over again. The same stupid "shark" photo comes up every ten photos or so.

Instagram may want to seize the moment, but it can't, it does not have the tools to cope with this kind of event.

Twitter makes it possible to surface the better quality tweets and the fact that you have to write your own makes it less likely that people will post over and over again.

That's not to say Instagram couldn't create a way of surfacing the interesting images related to an event. Right now, there should be over 250,000 photos related to Hurricane Sandy on Instagram.